The Metropolitan Museum of Art has about 1.5 million works in its collection. Roughly 5% of that collection is on display at any time. While many works have been digitised and made available online, the sheer size of that database makes discovery difficult.
Check Yourself Before You Met Yourself is an experimental installation that invites visitors to find a personal connection in the Met Museum's archives by searching for their name. Via the MET's public API, it returns a single result—a needle in the digital haystack.
Met Yourself was a class project for Connections Lab at IMA Low Res. I showed it at the 2023 ITP/IMA Winter Show, where a few hundred people tried it out.
I could see something like this installed in a museum for visitors to engage with the museum's collection and archive in a different way. It would be amazing to find a piece and be directed to the exact room (or, in the case of multi-site museums, building) in which the piece lives. For artworks in storage, on loan or otherwise unavailable for live viewing, It would be a way for museum-goers to still partake of that artwork. High-resolution images, 3D, WebGL or XR could further enhance the experience.
